February 2012 Newsletter

Welcome to the Feburuary edition of the IEEE-TCMC (Technical Committee on Multimedia Computing) monthly mailing. TCMC membership is officially determined by signing up with the IEEE Computer Society either with your membership or later through:

The First International Workshop on Multimedia Databases and Data Engineering (MDDE'12) will take place in Istanbul, Turkey on August 27–31, 2012, in conjunction with The 38th International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB 2012). MDDE'12 aims to provide a forum for researchers from all fields of multimedia databases and data engineering, including experts in multimedia indexing, multimedia data mining, in-depth media content processing, multimedia searching, analysis, management, and retrieval. Recent advances in computing, networking, storage, and information technology have enabled the collection and distribution of vast amounts of multimedia data in a variety of applications such as entertainment, education, environmental protection, e-commerce, public safety, digital government, homeland security, and manufacturing. However, big data and large scale analytics is a fundamental problem within multimedia data processing and understanding, and several important questions remain to be answered. For examples, what are suitable indexing structures that can facilitate multimedia search and management? What are the system requirements for a multimedia database that can manage various types of media data, including images, videos, audios, multimedia presentations, and media-enriched texts? How to enable and incorporate multimedia data mining and knowledge discovery into existing multimedia database architectures? How can cloud computing facilitate ubiquitous multimedia computing? How to integrate human-computer interaction with data mining to help users understand and interact with big multimedia data corpus?

PROGRAM CHAIRS Dr. Shu-Ching Chen, Florida International University Dr. Mei-Ling Shyu, University of Miami Dr. Chengcui Zhang, The University of Alabama at Birmingham Dr. Tansel Ozyer, TOBB Economics and Technology University

SUBMISSIONS Prospective authors are invited to submit papers (English only) presenting original research. Submissions should be no more than 7 VLDB proceedings pages. Only electronic submission (PDF only) is accepted. The Preparation and Formatting Guidelines can be found on

Proceedings will be distributed to all participants at the workshop. Selected submissions will be invited to submit extended papers for the International Journal of Multimedia Data Engineering and Management (IJMDEM).

Given the emerging global Information-centric IT landscape that has tremendous social and economic implications, effectively processing and integrating humungous volumes of information from diverse sources to enable effective decision making and knowledge generation have become one of the most significant challenges of current times. Information Reuse and Integration (IRI) seeks to maximize the reuse of information by creating simple, rich, and reusable knowledge representations and consequently explores strategies for integrating this knowledge into systems and applications. IRI plays a pivotal role in the capture, representation, maintenance, integration, validation, and extrapolation of information; and applies both information and knowledge for enhancing decision-making in various application domains.

This conference explores three major tracks: information reuse, information integration, and reusable systems. Information reuse explores theory and practice of optimizing representation; information integration focuses on innovative strategies and algorithms for applying integration approaches in novel domains; and reusable systems focus on developing and deploying models and corresponding processes that enable Information Reuse and Integration to play a pivotal role in enhancing decision-making processes in various application domains.

The IEEE IRI conference serves as a forum for researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government to present, discuss, and exchange ideas that address real-world problems with real-world solutions. Theoretical and applied papers are both included. The conference program will include special sessions, open forum workshops, panels and keynote speeches.

The conference includes, but is not limited to, the areas listed below:

Best Paper Award: IEEE IRI will be presenting a Best Paper award. The best paper will be selected by separate committee and will be the one that reports the most novel and promising research work that has a high potential impact in the real world.

Papers are solicited in the above workshop theme, including (but not limited to) the following topics, covering the general scope of social multimedia computing:

* Theoretical underpinnings and computational infrastructure of social multimedia computing; * Multimedia social network analysis, in particular on large-scale datasets; * Social multimedia search, especially the search and ranking algorithms from collaboratively tagged images, and online user-generated videos; * Social multimedia mining and learning from user data (e.g., users' behaviors, preferences, or interests), social context (e.g., social network, structure and relationships) and socially collected data (e.g., metadata from social activity, collaboratively tagged data, and vlogs); multimedia communication and networking by utilizing multimedia social network analysis; * The design and development of new multimedia social interaction tools; * Privacy and copyright issues over social multimedia data; * Distributed/parallel algorithms and paradigms for large-scale social multimedia computing; * Novel and challenging applications of social multimedia (e.g., interactive services and entertainment, social services and security applications).

Submission: Authors are invited to submit a full paper (two column format, 6 pages) according to the guidelines available on the main conference website. The review will be double blind and at least three reviewers are required. Only electronic submissions will be accepted. Accepted papers must be registered and presented; otherwise they will not be included in the IEEE Xplore Library. For more information, please see the main conference website: http://www.icme2012.org/